Castanza

Nibbled some more RTX and PCYO

CRSR starter Recent IPO, looks interesting at these levels. Basically 1x sales, decent free cash flow, margins are meh, but growth seems to be there. https://ir.corsair.com/

I had the same thought. I realize PCYO is concentrated in one area and the big homebuilders are much more geographically diverse, but it's strange that PCYO hasn't really budged. PCYO lost all the high margin $ from the Oil and Gas industry ( both royalty and fracking water ). That’s not a problem a home builder has. The majority of rev doesn't come from O&G supply but I agree they are handicapped (in this segment) near term due to oil and gas production. Guidance for revenue and profitability is still there despite the lull in that segment.

Small adds to RTX, PCYO, PPL

https://twitter.com/michaeljburry/status/1308511573271478273?s=21

BRK.B - slowly exiting over the past week. Reduced positions another 15% Closed my remaining GOOG calls to free up more cash Sitting about 70% cash now

I get the thesis with sports teams in general...they are trophy assets that keep going up in value because billionaires don't have anything better to do with their fortunes. Most of these teams don't generate much in the way of cash flow (probably except NFL due to non-guaranteed nature of contracts), so it's kind of like owning gold where you hope that there's a bigger fool who wants the team for glamour. There may be a more fundamental angle to this, but I guess I prefer assets that cash flow or have a reasonable expectation of cash flowing. In the case of MLB specifically , you're owning part of a sport that has an aging fan base and while I wouldn't bet anything on this, the long-term bear case would be that some of these sports become way less relevant and are displaced by alternatives (gaming/esports, soccer). To put it plainly...it looks cheap. Baseball may be declining but I’m not too worried about that in the near term (5 yrs). I think the game will change and evolve and people will eventually come back to it. Plus there is the whole tax haven for some billionaire angle to owning a sports team https://www.yourfinancialwizard.com/taxation-professional-sports-teams-team-owners/ It’s not a huge position for me currently, but I’ll probably continue to add over the next year if it stays depressed. I’m a bit of a sucker for simple thesis.

There is no strong evidence when predicting the future of COVID. We have mixed evidence: a virus with some flu-like characteristics (which may gain viral strength during traditional flu season) ; a "second-wave" which hit the US in June-Aug ; a lack of a "second wave" in most of Europe ; vaccine progress which to date seems mixed (historically vaccines require aprox 18 months to develop, if at all possible) When presented with conflicting evidence, usually the responsible decision is to "play it safe". At least that is my perspective, yours may differ. “Playing it safe” should be reserved for situations where the outcome is more binary. A we’ve seen so far, lockdowns affect far more than just the spread of the virus. I mean, wasn’t the objective to “flatten the curve” as to not overwhelm hospital systems?

https://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-report-joe-rogan-transphobia-fight-employees2020-9

Does anyone have an reasons not to use Robinhood besides... - it's limited on markets and some equities - it has crashed multiple times this past year - options detail and charts aren't good Besides that, if you're not holding any precarious positions that could screw you in the event of a crash then why not?

Picked up this book about a month ago on a friends recommendation. Had no idea it was written by Oddballstocks. So far I'm about half way through. Very well written and a great primer on a subject I knew little about. kudos to you Oddballstocks

tldr; SQL db is still one of the better ways to keep data if it's organized and structure of data doesn't change a lot. Mongo is designed for less than structured data where you may not know what the structure is. Because you get the flexibility of handling data without knowing what data structure will look like, you lose the ability to do a lot of stuff that can be done in SQL-based dbs. This is based on my work with Mongo few years back so things may have changed: Basically, the way Mongo is setup it allows indexing but not really joins. It allows for faster queirs, but doesn't work if you need joins - basically connecting data across more than one table in the database. That makes Mongo not particularly useful for transactional (think logging of Visa transactions or something like that) systems. There is another concept in databases called normalization - basically, reduce data redundancy which improves a lot of things when it comes to data quality. Because MongoDB is a schema-less db, you can't do normalization so data can be total garbage if there aren't solid rules around ETL processing prior t pushing data into the database. This. Also, in many industry problems where quality and traceability is important (most obvious example is healthcare), it is a very high burden to create and implement transaction processing rules that are rock solid. Oracle and other databases have evolved over decades to handle edge cases around complex transactions. Another important issue in such industries is transaction management with simultaneous users trying to update related set of data. A lot of companies that are starting data warehousing process do not have bandwidth (software/IT) to implement these from scratch around unstructured databases like MongoDB. As for valuation, I am not sure if all this is worth 60B. I personally know a lot of companies in healthcare where if cloud infrastructure is needed they either (a) go for AWS offering because it offers everything in a bundle for good enough price that there is no incentive to choose something piecemeal and new like snowflakes to save a few bucks and transaction efficiency. or (b) they contract out a lot of such work to third party software service providers (specialty software firms providing services to healthcare industry) who have team of software/IT experts. There the 3rd party may find it cheaper to use some combination of traditional SQL on a cheaper cloud server provider plus GCE/Lambda for compute to make the margins for themselves instead of giving it all to AWS/snowflakes. IT departments have been growing a lot at companies in general. There seems to be a bit of a trend where companies are building out their own servers, managing them, and even implementing their own private clouds. As the talent pool continues to grow this no longer becomes the out of reach rocket science it once was. Companies can internalize this and avoid the nickle and dime death of AWS. Obviously not every company will be capable of this. Snowflake currently does not offer anything proprietary that someone else couldn't do. Both Google Cloud and Amazon (Redshift) already offer similar products. Cloudera is a relatively similar company and they are nowhere near the current valuation of SNOW. Personally, I wouldn't buy at this valuation.

BATRK

FWIW: Brookfield potentially interested in WPD sale https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iberdrola-brookfield-said-consider-bids-153157770.html

tldr; SQL db is still one of the better ways to keep data if it's organized and structure of data doesn't change a lot. Mongo is designed for less than structured data where you may not know what the structure is. Because you get the flexibility of handling data without knowing what data structure will look like, you lose the ability to do a lot of stuff that can be done in SQL-based dbs. This is based on my work with Mongo few years back so things may have changed: Basically, the way Mongo is setup it allows indexing but not really joins. It allows for faster queirs, but doesn't work if you need joins - basically connecting data across more than one table in the database. That makes Mongo not particularly useful for transactional (think logging of Visa transactions or something like that) systems. There is another concept in databases called normalization - basically, reduce data redundancy which improves a lot of things when it comes to data quality. Because MongoDB is a schema-less db, you can't do normalization so data can be total garbage if there aren't solid rules around ETL processing prior t pushing data into the database. +1 The docs for Snowflake is a pretty good primer on what they offer and do. https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/intro-key-concepts.html#:~:text=Snowflake%20runs%20completely%20on%20cloud,for%20persistent%20storage%20of%20data.

@patience_and_focus are you out of your mind? Just because someone repeats something does not prove that they really believe it. Yeah, Foley can "imagine and believe in something that usual folks cannot" Dude, take it easy on the kool-aid. Do you know how much acid is in that shit? LOL Tech Crunch Disrupt is a great example of this. Every wide eyed coder who steps foot on stage either begins or ends with the tag line "our revolutionary tech will change the world". The world is not short on overly optimistic entrepreneurs who deeply believe in their products.

Yeah, maybe they can make it shaped like a little gold star and require people to wear it on their person visible for all.... ::)

Interesting I was wondering about the potential anti-trust with this acquisition.

Sure that's fair I guess I'm coming more from the cutting edge perspective. I mean this will be the driving force for companies like NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Samsung etc.

Very interesting. If this goes through, there could be big changes in partnerships. This industry is (imo) going to have some major shake ups over the next decade. Perhaps we will see new companies (Chinese) pop up. Two global manufacturers will not cut it long term. The supply constraint is already quite visible. Currently only two major chip manufacturers (Intel, TSMC). Not counting Samsung. NVDA was having some issues with TSMC negotiations. Highlighting both the positive and minuses of in-house foundry. Apple uses ARM license to manufacture own products. I believe they are also working in their own discrete graphics card for laptops. If NVDA takes over ARM this could cause issues for Apple. AMD is going to supply Apple in the near term with discrete graphics cards (in some models : likely to use Intel in higher end models). Apple said a few weeks ago they will move away from AMD in a few years. Intel with its corporate issues managed to put out the Tiger Lake chip. Also utilizing more outsourcing for chips.

I think some overplay the "community" aspects. How much of a community is it actually? You can't hit on guys and girls, you don't meet other people. You hide behind a forum and some performance numbers. Maybe every 10 rides you will have the instructor yell out on live stream "pick up the pace OneBallLance42069!". I don't really see the value in that. The best thing Peloton does is build aesthetically attractive bikes that have solid software for performance tracking. Right now a Peloton is a status symbol like all exercise equipment that has come before it. How long the fad can last I don't know. I now have three friends who have purchased Pelotons. Upon hanging out with each of them I was greeted with the phrase "come check out my Peloton." Couldn't help but sense the buyers remorse and clout fishing. Personally I think something like https://www.whoop.com/ is more likely take off long term. It's not confined to any one activity and still introduces the community aspects of competition. Until a piece of exercise equipment mimics the Disney Animal Kingdom ride experience "Flight of Passage", I will continue to be on the fad train. Even then I would be skeptical long term.

You can like the product and hate the investment. It's difficult to have any margin of safety when the foundation of a thesis is "consumers like this and I hope they continue to like it."

This is also a lie. I thought the protests WOULD result in spread. I haven't seen any evidence that they ACTUALLY HAVE though. There is a very good reason why 30M people protesting might not impact overall spread of Covid. You are a smart guy, I'm sure you will figure it out. I needed someone smarter to explain it to me. Hint: there are more than 30 million people in the world. You’re a smart guy too. If 6k people in an arena for one night result in covid spread. Then it should be logical to think that 30m people crossing state lines and protesting with and without masks for months would result in increased spread. You know why there are no studies on it? Because it would be political suicide to come out against it.

Please keep BLM on the political threads. This lie would take about 3 seconds to debunk, but I don't want to clutter this thread. Right....you must have missed the part where their leader said they were trained marxists right? And they justified the looting saying people should go take their reparations. This response is quite comical coming from the guy who called out the Trump protests for spreading Covid but then had the balls to say 30m people protesting for months had zero impact on Covid spread. Give me a break.... ;D

Trump does not have the nation's interest at heart. Any actions to that end are purely coincidental. If he was truly concerned with preventing national hysteria, he would have made efforts to meet BLM protesters in the middle, rather than stoke that fire. His actions to protect national interests are inconsistent, because that is not his goal. His actions to protect Trump interests are absolutely consistent, because that is his goal. You don’t meet terrorists in the middle. There is zero middle ground when you go around burning, looting, and destroying private property. You don’t get to go around harassing and attacking random white people and then expect some “middle ground” to be met. Sorry LC but that is a terrible take on the current environment. The United States does not negotiate with terrorists. BLM by their own admission is a terrorist organization. Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”